swamp ophelia

Remember that time I went to Colonial Williamsburg to research a fic? I actually wrote that fic! And had a blast doing it!

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Title: with the sun in my eyes
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Pitt (TV)
Rating: General Audiences
Wordcount: 11,905
Warnings:  No Archive Warnings Apply 
Relationships: Melissa “Mel” King/Frank Langdon
Characters: Melissa “Mel” King, Frank Langdon, Mel King’s family 
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Colonial Williamsburg, Nerd4Nerd, Period Costumes, more importantly: period hats, the embarrassment of wearing the same t-shirt as everyone else in your grade on a field trip, too much information about 18th century craftsmanship, felicity is the best american girl fight me, melissa “mel” king is very lonely, Autistic Melissa “Mel” King, Appalachian Frank Langdon, Virginian Melissa “Mel” King, this is extremely cheesy, You Have Been Warned
Summary:

“Whoa! Your dress is so cool!”

Mel jumped at the sound of the loud voice. A boy was standing just to her right, a giant grin on his face, and—was he talking to her? She stared at him, at his sweaty, floppy hair; at his lime-green t-shirt that read East McDowell Middle School in blocky white letters; at the weird dent in his chin. He was clearly a couple of years older than her, old enough that she was surprised he was talking to a girl at all, much less her. The older middle school boys at her church avoided the girls like the plague and always sat on the other side of the classroom during Sunday school. She couldn’t remember the last time an older boy had voluntarily spoken to her.

But this boy didn’t seem put off by her silent gaping. He just bounced where he stood, arms swinging by his sides, and asked, “Where’d you get it?”

It came out more like whuhrdj’gettit and his eyes were so blue they were almost scary, but he looked like he really wanted to know. So she swiped at the tear tracks on her face with the back of her hand and offered, “I got it for my birthday. It’s Felicity’s.”

“Yeah? Who’s she?”

Wow! Most of my experiences of a book resonating with me so deeply that I'm practically vibrating--where I have to slow down and draw out the reading experience--where I know from the first chapter that the book is going to change the way I see the world--are reserved for fiction. I was not expecting to find it in a nonfiction book I found by chance while scrolling through the recently added audiobooks filter on Libby.

But this book articulated so many things I've instinctively felt but previously had no language for around the topic of mental health even as it taught me things I didn't know at all. Khameer Kidia draws on his experiences as a kid growing up in Zimbabwe, a college- and then medical student and then resident in the US, a medical practitioner and researcher and anthropologist in both countries, and a deeply compassionate human being wherever he goes to explain why we have a global mental health crisis, how it manifests differently depending on context, how we have tried and failed to treat it, and what it might really take to promote mental wellbeing for everyone.

It's way too simplistic to say "capitalism was the villain all along!" even though…that's kind of true? But this book doesn't read like a tankie Bluesky screed against some vaguely defined idea of capitalism; instead, it's a thoughtful examination of the ways in which colonialism, imperialism, and the hoarding of wealth by the powerful create a world so difficult to live in that of course people struggle.

Kidia doesn't deny that there are chemicals in the brain that can affect how we feel and operate or that certain medications can help people. But he views mental wellbeing as a holistic part of both individual and communal life that's deeply rooted in people's lived experiences, the support systems they have or don't have, and the way systemic hierarchies affect everything. He's not afraid to come right out and say, "This person probably has (what the Global North calls) severe depression because they don't know how they're going to feed their family tonight, and if you give them money, they will get better." And then backs it up with research that proves that sometimes money is the actual solution.

He's also very respectful of indigenous treatments for mental distress, not in a woo-woo kind of way, but because of an understanding that communities have created mechanisms over generations to make people feel more rooted, secure, and supported and that, when practiced in the context of the communities that created them, these can be as effective as medication or CBT or anything else that Western medicine promotes. I am famously allergic to woo, but this balanced approach seems very wise to me (and also helped me realize that I mostly hate woo because it's usually white people appropriating practices that belong to other cultures that only work within the context of those cultures, not because of those practices themselves. As usual, context is everything).

Throughout, the book is engaging, operating on multiple levels as diagnosis of a global health problem, multiple case studies both long-term (his mother) and short-term (patients he saw for a single appointment), a critique of colonialism, a sort of microhistory of the last fifty years of Zimbabwe's history, and a memoir of his own growth both as someone who experiences mental distress and someone who treats it.

I don't tend to enjoy memoir, and when a writer mixes personal experiences with cultural criticism or historical narrative, it usually doesn't work for me. But Kidia is an incredible writer in addition to being a skilled anthropologist and a caring doctor, and the way he uses the experiences of his family members, his patients, and his country in this book is really masterful. Moving backwards and forwards through time, talking about how colonialism affected both his parents and the country he grew up in, contrasting life and expectations and values in the US with Zimbabwe--he's weaving so many threads together that a less talented writer and thinker would have surely dropped a few or at least created troublesome tangles. But he carried me right through to the very end.

David Graeber (forgive me! I'm a caricature of myself!) popularized the slogan "freedom and care" as a way of describing the animating principle of anarchism. I don't quite consider myself an anarchist, despite how much anarchic thought has influenced me, but "freedom and care" are ideals I strive to live by. This book is an articulation of what happens when care is subjected to a market economy that doesn't actually care about it and where the burden for providing care falls disproportionately on under- or unpaid women, particularly black and brown women--and where that market economy creates entire societies that are leeching the resources and labor from other, poorer societies.

Kidia's prescriptions are a) redistribute wealth globally because humanity is an interconnected web, b) prioritize autonomy and dignity for those who are dealing with mental distress (this is where the "freedom" part comes in), and c) find treatments--from mutual aid to indigenous spiritual rituals to group houses to community aid workers--that work for the specific community you're working in. Things don't always translate across cultures or even across cities. One-size-fits-all solutions both do not work and also fundamentally misunderstand how people actually live in the world.

As is typical when I come across a book written by someone who is a keen-eyed observer of the problems of society but also works hard to care for those he can, I came away both discouraged and encouraged. The scale of the problem is huge. But economic eras wane, new ways of organizing ourselves emerge if we work hard enough, and change is always possible.

Protip: read the appendices first. Even if you listen to the audiobook. He talks a lot about language and why he uses the words he uses and I think it's really helpful in understanding his project.

What I finished:

+ Listened to More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker.

WHAT A BANGER! I anticipated that this would be about how fucked up our tech overlords' worldviews are from a moral and public policy perspective, and that certainly played a large part in it. But it ended up being more about why they're wrong about the very tech they're hyping--why the claims they make are not actually possible given, like, physics and the nature of the universe. Which is not an angle I'd seen explored before, and I would have expected it to all be over my head. But Becker is absolutely fantastic at explaining complicated tech and science-y things in a way that I could understand--at least enough to know that these Silicon Valley guys are full of shit.

The moral arguments are woven into all of this; Becker has a lovely humanist approach to the world and a deep appreciation for the humanities. He's clearly repulsed by the perspectives and priorities of the people who are running our digital world (and, increasingly, our physical one as well), so I felt safe in his hands. I often feel alienated from STEM subjects both because math doesn't come easily to me and because the current discourse around it seems so anti-human to me. But Becker reminded me that there's really no boundary between the humanities and STEM and that if you appreciate both, you better serve whichever one you're focused on. Life, nature, the universe is one interwoven textile and needs to be understood as such.

The more I learn about the decision-making class in Silicon Valley, the more I believe that they hate all the things that make us human--art, care, struggle, nature, bodies, again, death, humility, the mutuality of relationships. All of these people are absolutely terrified of death and yet, if they did succeed in their (futile) endeavors to live forever, what would they do with all that time? They're certainly not investing in learning about the world as it is or getting to know other people or creating beautiful things or just enjoying nature. So what would be the point of living forever? They have no answer to this and if they weren't doing such terrible, terrible things to our society and nature, I would feel profound pity for them. As it is, I'm just angry. It's baffling to me that we allow the most morally vacuous people in the world to make consequential decisions about the fate of humanity.

My one complaint is that I wish Becker had read the book himself. Judging by his new podcast Dreaming Against the Machine, he's got the voice for it, and I always, always prefer to have the writer read the book if it's possible. The guy who read it did fine, but there's just no replacing the personality of a writer.

+ Read The House of the Patriarch, the 18th Benjamin January series. You may ask yourself, "Is 18 simply too many books in this series?" And the answer is "NO!!!!" There can never be too many books in this series!

For those of you who are new to my favorite currently-being-written series of books: these historical mysteries follow Benjamin January, a free man of color, in 1830s-40s New Orleans and beyond. The mysteries are good, but they're really an excuse to explore Ben's world: the complicated and colorful people he knows and loves and fears and hates, the vivid and singular and meticulously-researched world of antebellum New Orleans. These are books about power and oppression, about resisting it and not being able to resist it, about building relationships with people who are very different than you are, about how those relationships are really the only thing worth anything in a world of darkness and cruelty. I love them with all my heart.

This is one of the not-in-New Orleans books; Ben is searching for a young white woman who disappeared in upstate New York's "burnt over district" in a time of weird religious groups. A favorite topic of mine! My first thought was, "We're going to get a Joseph Smith cameo!" but no, we're a few years after he left for Illinois, so while he's mentioned a time or two he does not show up. The historical cameo we do get is much more unexpected and made me laugh. The cameos are always such a fun part of the not-in-New-Orleans books, and Hambly's writing is grounded enough that Ben never quite turns into the Forrest Gump of the antebellum US (and Mexico and Cuba and France and wherever else he goes!).

The mystery itself is engaging--I was very invested in Eve Russell, who became one of my favorite one-off characters--and, as usual, Hambly makes fantastic use of a period of American history that doesn't get a lot of fictional attention. I especially appreciated that palpable danger that the non-white characters were in even in ostensibly "free" New York--there are traffickers everywhere just waiting to capture free black people and sell them into slavery down south. No one can breathe easy because everyone is in danger all the time. Of all the fictional media I've encountered, this series as a body of work is one of the best at communicating the totality of the chattel slavery system--how it affected every single thing about life for black people, every moment of every day. How no one was ever, ever safe and how hard people had to fight for even the relative safety that a few were able to find. How it tainted the whole society, how it curdled souls. I always come away with an understanding of just why the Civil War had to happen, why the abolitionist movement probably never would have succeeded without violence. Slavery had to be ripped out at the roots.

Anyway, since we weren't in New Orleans, I missed Rose and Hannibal and Livia and Dominique and Shaw and Olympe and everybody back home, but we did get some excellent Chloe scenes, which are always a bonus! (Chloe!!!) As usual, I spent the whole book going, "When will Ben get to go home? When will he get to have a bath and a good meal and a full night's sleep and see his wife and children???" because nobody whumps their main character the way Hambly does.

But somehow no matter how dark the subject matter of these books are, they never make me feel hopeless. Heavy with the reminder of all the things that people do to each other, yes, but also fiercely grateful for all the ways we find to take care of each other. Gah, I love these books!

+ Listened to Culture Creep by Alice Bolin, a collection of essays at the intersection of feminism and pop culture. Your degree of enjoyment will depend largely on how willing you are to read personal essays that dive deep into things that most people would say "it's not that deep" about (Animal Crossing, wellness tracking, teen magazines, the Playboy Mansion). Most people's eyes would probably glaze over, and honestly I'm not sure if I would have kept up with this if I was reading it, but listening to it while working was enjoyable enough. I don't care for memoir as a genre unless the writer is really freaking fantastic, so when things are too person, I tend to check out, but this managed to be rooted enough in the texts themselves for me to never do that, and Bolin has some really sharp insights throughout. All in all a fine audiobook experience.


What I'm currently reading:

+ Listening to God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O'Gieblyn. Well this is a unique book! It's philosophy and technology all tangled up together, at once personal and universal, about the past and the future, meaning and consciousness and nature. O'Gieblyn is incredibly smart and the book is very challenging in a way I appreciate. I also appreciate that she grew up fundamentalist and went to a Bible college before becoming an atheist; there's this one moment where she talks about how a process that took society centuries of bloody struggle (moving from Christian to secular societies) is something that those of us who were raised in rightwing Christianity have to do on our own in the course of a few years, and I have never heard anyone talk about it that way. But yeah, it's really hard to go from "the world is 6,000 years old" to "the universe is billions of years old" and all that those things imply in a short period of time! It's a lot for an individual human being, and she does an incredible job of evoking the disruption of that and also how things linger even when you don't want them to.

+ Reading Hunting Shadows by Charles Todd, 16th in the Inspector Ian Rutledge series of historical mysteries. This series is set in the UK just after WWI and has a shell-shocked Scotland Yard inspector as its protagonist. These are suitably engaging and twisty mysteries for when that's what I want. They kind of all blur together in my head, but that's fine--I don't need everything to be Benjamin January. I don't like cozy mysteries, and these are not, but they also don't lean too far into the gritty darkness either. It's a good balance, well written, and I continue to enjoy this series as I dip in and out of it.

Trying to bring this back!

What I finished:

+ Disciples of White Jesus: The Radicalization of American Boyhood by Angela Denker. This was not exactly what I expected, which was a more sociological exploration of the way that white Christian boys are being taught white supremacist/Christian nationalist beliefs. Instead, it was a very personal journalistic exploration that drew on sociological data. Denker did things like travel to Columbia, SC to meet the pastor of the young man who murdered worshipers at Mother Emanuel church in Charleston, talked to pastor teaching confirmation classes in rural Midwestern communities, and drew on her own work as a pastor to get an angle on what white Christian boys are being taught about masculinity.

This is very much a book for Christians; it is written from a progressive Christian perspective and as such would probably be annoying to people who are progressive but not Christian. Still, I don't regret listening to it and I am glad this resource is out there for Christians who are trying to combat extremism within the church.

What I'm reading:

+ Orlando by Virginia Woolf for book club. I'm about 1/3 of the way through, and I am glad this wasn't my first Woolf. The language and the flashing insights are gorgeous, of course, and I actually love how deeply weird it is with things like time--it's absolutely written on a mythic scale which I think is very cool--but I think if this was my first Woolf I would be more wtf??? about it. The casual racism is a lot!

I don't know that I will ever love this like I do Mrs. Dalloway, but it's certainly an interesting reading experience and I am enjoying myself! We'll see how I feel when I'm done.

+ The Magician's Daughter by H.G. Parry. Despite my intense annoyance at books about female protagonists whose titles frame them in relationship to a man, I checked this one out on a whim. It has the energy of an old-school YA fantasy novel (complimentary) and I'm enjoying it! It doesn't feel formulaic or as simplistic as most YA does today, even if it doesn't quite have the richness of my old faves.

I was taken from the beginning; the story starts out with a teenage girl who's been raised on a magical island in a crumbling castle, knowing nothing about the rest of the world except what she's read through books. Classic Lauren-bait, 11/10, no notes. Once we leave the island, things don't hit quite as hard for me, though I'm reserving my judgement until I finish it.

It turns out it's one of those "magic is disappearing!" books, which I think is an overdone trope, but this is certainly one of the better versions of that story I've read. The worldbuilding is quite fun, even if it isn't very innovative. There's no romance, the main relationship is between the protagonist and the man who raised her, which is well done. Hopefully we'll get some real emotional oomph in the last third of the book and I will be able to unabashedly recommend this to people who are looking for a light but not insubstantial read.

+ "You Just Need to Lose Weight" and 19 Other Myths About Fat People by Aubrey Gordon. I just needed an audiobook to listen to while I was cooking on Sunday, and I was like, "Wait! Aubrey from my beloved Maintenance Phase podcast has books! I can just listen to her read them!"

I knew a lot of this stuff already, but Aubrey is such a great person to hang out with--funny, compassionate, uncompromising when she needs to be. The work of fat advocacy she does must be exhausting considering the everything of our current culture (for a while there in the 2010s I really did think we were making strides on the topic of bodies, and then the one-two punch of Covid and weight loss drugs happened and now we're right back to heroin chic and it's so awful), but I admire her so much for doing it.